Open Letter

Right now, almond farming can be done in a highly-automated manner. Year by year, more crops will have viable automated harvesters and cultivators, as robotic equipment gets smarter. Robot vision systems will be able to distinguish crops from weeds, spot diseases on leaves, etc.

I can see having a little solar-powered robot going up and down the field, putting out a little blade to snip any weeds or bugs it sees, and injecting a fertilizer solution at the roots of each plant it passes. When it reaches the end of the row, it connects to a docking station which refills it with supplies, and then it goes down the next row.

At harvest time, it can go down each row, grab the ripe plants, put them in a hopper on its back, and bring them to a collection point. No humans (illegal or otherwise) will be required.

Click to expand...

My bold.

Next, the super-rich elite will find a way to get rid of all of us surplus humanoids.

I saw a video where they monitor crops with drones and another with a rolling green house. The interesting thing about the big green houses - it keeps the bugs out so you can eliminate pesticides. I saw another where hail is a concern and green houses help ward that off. In National Geographic there was a recent article about the dutch farms - they are cutting edge technology and produce so much, they sell to many countries.

This Tiny Country Feeds the World
The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

By Frank Viviano
Photographs by Luca Locatelli
This story appears in the September 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

In a potato field near the Netherlands’ border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.
From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he’s monitoring two drones—a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air—that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne’s production numbers testify to the power of this “precision farming,” as it’s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne’s fields reliably produce more than 20.
That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “Twice as much food using half as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.